Behind these walls

Back in the 50s and 60s, council estates were seen as the way forward for social housing, says Lynsey Hanley, who grew up on one of Europe's largest. So how come, half a century on, they're little more than open prisons for the poor?

We lived in Area 4. It was on the edge of the Wood - an estate on the periphery of Birmingham - in a row of terrace houses that led into a fistful of dead ends. Between the house and my primary school there were no more than a few yards of road, the rest being a series of interconnecting walks and avenues lined with more terraces and maisonettes. You could walk past the school and as far as the shopping centre, a mile away, and have to cross t the road once. From Area 4 into Area 5 (south), you'd pass along a predestined pebbledash strip, past my Aunty Lil's ground-floor flat, past the tower block where, in 2001, a man in his 30s shot himself in a siege, past the corner shop where, in 2002, a man was mown down by his own van and its getaway drivers.

Life wasn't always as dramatic as this, but it had its moments. One day, walking with my mother, we reached a whipping wall of wind. We were 100 yards - if that - from our destination, my school. It wasn't even an especially windy day, merely that what breeze there was raced around each 90-degree corner and was funnelled through the space between us and a squat row of garages. My mum picked me up and we tried shouldering our way through the forcefield. We had no chance. It threw us back like one magnet repelling another. Within a minute or two there were a dozen of us, infants and juniors, mostly travelling alone, all of us screaming, until a wised-up older girl called Marsha bossed us - even the adults - over to the back wall of the garages.

"Stand with yer backs to it! Down't move!"

A whirlpool of rubbish, by now containing my mum's glasses, sought an absent plughole. We were trapped inside it, assaulted by flying Panda Pops bottles and empty Quavers packets; tiny boys, the kind of boys who never blew their noses or had their noses blown for them, were whiplashed by their parka hoods. It lasted until the monolith relented, after what had seemed like an hour but was probably no longer than 10 minutes. The new glasses were snapped in two. We passed through in traumatised silence, with me leading my mum the rest of the way. I don't know how she found her way back home.

It was fine, though: people had jobs, people had families. At least, most of the ones we knew did. It felt as if the estate had always been there, even though it was barely 15 years old. We had an almond tree on the front lawn that produced sappy little buds. We lived near a playing field, next to the maternity hospital where I was born and my mother before me. When she was born, my granddad had to cycle from the edge of Birmingham through a thick bluebell wood to reach his wife and newborn daughter.

The bluebells survived until 1964, when Richard Crossman, Labour's new minister for housing, legislated for Birmingham City Council to buy green belt land - halfway between the second city and Coventry - on which to build nearly 20,000 flats and houses as part of a massive slum-clearance project. It's easy to groan, "What was he thinking?" But when cities were still filled with slums at the dawn of the white-hot technological era, when children were still playing on wartime bombsites 20 years after VE Day, something had to be done.

The City Architect signed off the plan and work commenced. It was completed in 1969, five years after work had begun, and just after my mum - by then 17 - had moved to a brand-new end-of-terrace house in Area 6 (south) with my grandparents. At 21, my mum would marry my dad, move a mile away for a couple of years, and move back to the estate shortly after I was born. By then the Wood Estate, as it had come to be known, had bedded in and already begun to take on that sometimes glaring, sometimes murky, sometimes solid, sometimes flimsy - but somehow always uniform - look of municipal housing. Nearly 60,000 people lived there, on what was one of the biggest council estates in Europe. And yet it still didn't feel like a town.

The Wood. I was born there, and lived there between the ages of 18 months and 18 years. Even though I have lived away from home for more than a third of my life now, it continues to shape the way I think about the world outside it. Rather like rappers who continue to talk about the ghetto experience long after they have moved up and out to their own country ranches, it's a lifelong state of mind. Perhaps this is because, even though I live a long way from my original hood, I still live on an estate; this time in the inner city, but surrounded once more by tall, inhospitable-looking tower blocks. They sap the spirit, suck out hope and ambition, and draw in apathy and nihilism. It's hard to explain why I feel so strongly about housing in this way, other than that I know I had a lucky escape where others did not, and that too many people will not know what I mean by that.

It's not something you think about when you're growing up. Wow, I'm really alienated. My school is suffering from its single-class intake. What this estate needs is a decent public-transport infrastructure. It's more a sense you have. A sense that someone, who lives in a proper house, in a proper town, sat on the floor of an office one day with a box of fancy Lego bricks and laid out, with mathematical precision, a way of housing as many people as possible in as small a space as could be got away with. And, in so doing, forgot that real people aren't inanimate yellow shapes with permanent smiles branded on their plastic bodies. That real people might get lost in such a place.

Council estates are nothing to be scared of, unless you are frightened of inequality. They are a physical reminder that we live in a society that divides people according to how much money they have to spend on shelter. My heart sags every time it senses the approach of those flat, numbing boxes that prickle the edges of every British town. I don't have a good relationship with council-owned or council-built housing; yet money, or lack thereof, draws me back to live in it, as it does with anyone in housing need.

Play word association with the term "council estate". Estates mean alcoholism, drug addiction, relentless petty stupidity, a kind of stir-craziness induced by chronic poverty and the human mind caged by the rigid bars of class and learned incuriosity. When the Wood's local football club plays a team from elsewhere in the borough, they compete to the sound of a terrace chant that goes, "Go back! To your council estate!" sung to the tune of Go West by Village People. Recidivists are reported in newspapers to live on this or that estate as though it were a matter of course that they would. Any rich or famous person about whom it's discovered that they were brought up in a council house, no matter what else distinguishes them, is understood to have something of the Eliza Doolittle about them.

The first time I visited the estate in the East End neighbourhood where I now live, I was canvassing against the British National Party in 1994. It struck me as the most depressing place I'd ever seen and I could barely imagine what kind of desperate state I'd have to be in to find myself living there. Five years later, I moved on to that very estate, into a one-bedroom flat that was leaky with condensation and that overlooked the world's least savoury pub. The rubbly patch of waste concrete outside our block is still one of the grimmest places it is possible to see. Drunks, to a man and woman on crutches, clobber one another with cans of Special Brew on their patch next to a trio of burnt-out Daleks posing as recycling bins. In the summer, the young-but-old girls join them, often with their babies, wandering in circles all day between the off-licence, the pub and, when hungry, the chip shop, spending whatever they have left on cigs and mobile-phone credit. It's a gutting kind of personal squalor, to have nowhere else to go but this terrible square which offers little that may help them, except that which enables them to forget where they are.

It is a reminder that people fight themselves or each other, rather than the system, simply because it's easier and there's an obvious way to do it. Because the secrets of that system have been opened up to me through years of non-compulsory education and the social mobility that comes with it, none of this public squalor affects me directly. Although I'm aware of the monolithic and frustrating nature of the authorities, I have learned how to deal with them confidently and to get done the things that need to be done. I have the money and freedom to create a comfortable home in an ex-local authority flat that's prone to damp; indeed, I know whom I must call when that damp threatens to ruin my chest and clothes. All this means that I'm less likely to want to scrap outside the chip shop. One day in 2003, I came across this story in a local newspaper:

A Wood man found himself in hot water after asking his estranged partner to fill up his Pot Noodle. The 30-year-old admitted putting his hands around his partner's neck and pulling out her earring, causing a cut ear and lip and a scratched neck. Colin Doyle, defending, said that his client lived opposite the house where his partner lives with their two children, and he had gone over to ask for some hot water after his own home had been burgled, leaving him with no food.

Perhaps this is why the brand name Pot Noodle - "the slag of all snacks" - seems so apt an emblem of the council estate. It's synonymous with seaminess, of lives not lived well but eked out joylessly, and, again, used as a fun insult by those who have grown tired of disguising their snobbery. The collision of Pot Noodles, wife-beating and council estates in a single news clip seems almost too funny to be true. It encourages a kind of forehead-slapping despair in otherwise right-thinking people who wonder how a country with a national health service and universal child benefit could fail to prevent people's lives from turning out so catastrophically.

Broadly, there are two public perceptions of the British council estate. The first is of the dream gone sour. Council homes were once the gold standard for a bright, uncynical working class with every reason to feel entitled to the best the state had to offer them. To get a council house in the immediate postwar period was to have a full stake in society. Council homes were never intended to be holding cages for the poor and disenfranchised, but that's how they ended up. The second perception is bound up in the myth that the poor will always be with us, and that the existence of cheap housing to contain them is a nasty fact of life. You've got to put them somewhere, after all. Only the rich, it seems, are permitted to nibble away at the green belt, with land-greedy "executive estates": ghettoes for those who can choose which type of ghetto they want to live in. The regeneration and rebuilding of once-coveted housing estates, on the other hand, is a waste of taxpayers' money, because they - the dregs, the scum - will only go and have more babies, smoke more fags, fry more chips and set fire to the whole damned place when the lit match hits their shell suit.

There is one political quotation that is guaranteed to make me mash my right fist into my left hand every time I think of it. It's attributed to Margaret Thatcher. She is widely quoted as saying in 1986 that a man who finds himself, beyond the age of 26, on a bus can consider himself a failure. By that sick logic, every person who takes part in public life, whether by using public transport or living in public-owned housing, has failed at the game.

The idea of investing in public-owned assets has returned, belatedly, to the top of the political agenda, but the lasting harm of that statement resounds. In newspapers and on television, every reference to a council estate is prefixed with the word "tough", as though bare-knuckle boxing is the leisure activity of choice for every British person who doesn't own their own home. All the people who live on estates are failures, and failure is not only contagious but morally repugnant. Any connection between the physical, economic and social isolation of council estates and the sometimes desperate behaviour of their tenants is ignored, or dismissed, or laughed at.

Since 1980, the Wood has been controlled - neatly and effectively, but with the same air of mortification displayed by the archetypal snob Hyacinth Bucket whenever her slovenly brother Onslow comes to visit in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances - by the more affluent Solihull metropolitan borough council. It refers to its unrepentant problem child as "North Solihull" . A new mayor, himself from one of the four council wards that cover the estate, announces an end to the apartheid, as though he can somehow will equality into existence at the same time as the council's own director of public health admits that his borough exhibits the greatest social polarity of any English local authority. In 2001, a man in Solihull proper could expect to live 71.4 years and a woman 77.6, which was roughly in accordance with the English average at the time. On the Wood, they could expect only to reach 61.8 and 66.1 respectively. Ward unemployment reached 23.3% in 1992, prompting the EU to list it as one of the most disadvantaged estates in western Europe and moving the Solihull Times to describe the Wood, on its front-page headline in 72-point bold type, as a blot on the landscape.

The road my parents live on is on the extreme south-eastern border of the estate: a long, boomerang-shaped crescent. Warren-like and labyrinthine, the Wood splashes itself over four pages of the A-Z. In the early days, people would regularly get lost looking for their own houses, such was the uniformity of the housing and the complexity of its design. I begin to walk. Five minutes later - five turns along short interlocking paths, and a hundred-odd homes, half a dozen terrace houses and a battenberg-cake layer of one-bedroom flats on either side of the walkway, with a bollard at each end - I come to my first road. I look back and realise exactly what fascinates me about the estate: it's all houses. That's what it is: houses everywhere, without a break. That's what it's there for. That's the only reason it's there.

The main road is empty when I reach it, so I skip across. Here there is a rare hill: the rest of the estate is entirely flat. It gives the landscape the variety of texture I realise I have been craving. At the top of this sort-of hill, I can see the centre of the estate. There is a large patch with no houses; instead, there is the drive-through McDonald's, the shopping precinct - a vast concrete pallet that can be entered only via ramps and footbridges - and the traffic roundabout, in the middle of which stands a sole pine tree that stays put from one Christmas to the next. It was supposed to be the beating heart: the focal point of a vast people-locker. A burger bar and two branches of KwikSave are the prizes that await you now if you can negotiate your way through the maze.

I exit through more terraces, more garages. The sameness drives me half mad. I have barely seen a single soul. I head towards a closed corner shop surrounded by grass-tufted bollards and prised-up paving slabs. Taking a sharp left, I find another walkway to plough along. I did go mad here, when I was 17. This walkway leads to the doctor's surgery, where - by then old enough to articulate this feeling I had had for half my life - I told the doctor I was depressed. It's smell-less and dark grey, and surrounded by tiny flats that pile on top of garages last painted in teal, in 1970. Security gates poke into the corners, of which there are too many to count as each yard of paving seems to lead off into another dead-end square. It has insanity designed into it. As if by order, a woman, the first I have seen for nearly an hour, bundles a snowman-sized Argos bag through the gate to her brown maisonette and tells her toddler son to fucking move or she'll fucking kill him.

The shorthand for proletarian hell used by those who don't live on them is "council estate", and this is what they mean. Yes, it exists, and this is why. You are a poor person, living at such close quarters with other poor people that you could take each other's faces (if you ever saw them) and rub them into the patch of dirt that separates one dwelling from the next. You are 20 minutes' walk from the nearest bus stop. You are sewn into rows of houses that are all inhabited, and yet you don't see anyone to whom you are not related for days at a time. You were put here and you don't know why.

I carry on towards the surgery. This is where they give the drugs to the people who live in the ghost-ship houses. I'm getting nearer to the motorway, but first there is a dual carriageway.

The environment here gets ever more inhospitable, louder and fumier. So that's where all the people are. They're all in cars.

To get to the other side of the estate, the part sliced off by the road, you have to walk under a long subway. There is no other way of crossing: all along the road, on either side, is a metal fence as tall as high hurdles. The subway entrance eats into the ground with 20 steep steps and no ramp. I gulp, muttering to myself not to be stupid, nothing's going to happen down there, and walk under the road, feeling every car bump above my head and almost leaping in shock when I see two women enter the other end with a pram, talking about someone they knew they couldn't trust because they hadn't seen them in the area before.

I emerge into Woodbine Walk, a long concrete pathway. At the end I find a strange little mole-hole for humans at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, from which you can see the heads of Dutch lorries heading north. There is a 20ft fence that was intended to block the noise from the M6. It doesn't: all it does is tell you that here is a wall you cannot climb. I walk closer to the mole-hole to inspect it: it's muddy and riven with the wheel marks of our old friend, the abandoned supermarket trolley. It opens out to a tunnel that burrows under the motorway, and on the other side of it is open country.

This is an edited extract from Estates: An Intimate History, by Lynsey Hanley, published next week by Granta at £12. To order a copy for £11, including free p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0870 836 0875.